Remote Wyoming vacation lodge emerges as haven for US ‘dissident’ right

A vacation lodge known as the Wagon Box Inn in the tiny town of Story, Wyoming, has emerged as an unlikely hub of rightwing ambitions to reorient US politics and culture.

Events held there since it opened, and others planned for this spring, have brought together figures from the so-called “dissident right”, political figures backed by reactionary currents in Silicon Valley, and proponents of the “network state” movement.

The dissident right is a term that describes rightwing intellectual currents that go beyond and even attack mainstream conservatives for their perceived concessions to liberals on issues like race, feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Network state proponents envision a network of extra-national communities that exist beyond the control of nation-states.

The Guardian contacted the Wagon Box founder and owner Paul McNiel for comment. He did not respond directly but instead posted a screenshot of the request to X appended with commentary.

There, McNiel said he was driven by “good-faith curiosity” that events there had been “largely focused on a suspicion of ‘the machine’” and boasted of the “breadth of the politics represented”, citing appearances by the likes of Patrick Deneen and Seneca Scott.

Deneen is a Notre Dame professor and conservative political theorist whose 2023 book Regime Change “offered a preview of the Trump administration’s intention to breathe fire on America’s cultural institutions” whose fans include JD Vance, the vice-president.

Scott, who McNiel described as a “90s Democrat who wants a safe community for his family and goats”, is a former union organizer based in Oakland, California, whose activism, political campaigning and social media output have targeted transgender people, homeless encampments, local media organizations, progressive politicians and city employees.

‘Liberalism is crumbling’

Sheridan county property records indicate that Paul McNiel bought the property that includes the Wagon Box – formerly a holiday destination and RV park – in August 2022.

Property records, satellite imagery, and media posted on social media platforms and on the Wagon Box website indicate a semi-rural location on the western fringes of Story.

Since McNiel took control of the property, it has played host to a string of events, many of them featuring figures associated with overlapping rightwing movements.

The project has drawn concerns in local media, but garnered a laudatory write-up in the Bari Weiss-founded Free Press. Free Press investors include rightwing tech figures like Marc Andreessen and Trump administration “crytpo czar” David Sacks.

McNiel – billed as a millionaire in an appearance on a real estate investment podcast in 2021 – is the principal of a legion of LLCs, according to company records in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana and North Carolina.

Another view of the Wagon Box Inn. Photograph: Google Maps

Property records and data brokers indicate that McNiel or LLCs controlled by him have bought and sold dozens of properties – many of them trailer parks or similar sites for low-cost housing – in at least three states.

According to founding documents on its website, Wagon Box is run as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a term for organizations managed in part via decentralized technologies like blockchains and smart contracts.

A 2021 Wyoming law allows DAOs to incorporate in the state, despite their often anonymous ownership structure. The sparsely populated state is notorious for a “cowboy cocktail” of loose financial regulations and opaque company ownership.

“We’re not northern Idaho or even Montana. We’ve so far managed to not attract the crazy far right to our state,” said Elizabeth Storer, a Democratic state representative from Jackson who has spoken critically of Wyoming’s libertarian financial laws and opacity.

“We’ve allowed just about anyone to come into Wyoming because of our low tax environment, our limited liability corporation laws and the use of registered agents all over the state – it allows people to offshore funds in Wyoming with a great deal of secrecy,” she added.

The current version of a document explaining the DAO aligns the project with the network state movement, claiming that “the grand project of liberalism is crumbling, and that in its wake people are looking for new avenues of allegiance and interdependence”.

The document continues “Balaji Srinivasan, among others, has identified this shift and suggested a process for uniting modern technologies with ancient human trends of association to create network states”, providing a link to Srinivasan’s self-published 2022 book of the same name.

Reverse diasporas

Srinavisan is an entrepreneur and investor formerly associated with companies including Andreessen-Horowitz and Coinbase. (That company’s current CEO, Brian Armstrong, is another outspoken booster of network states).

For more than a decade, Srinivasan has advocated a radical anarcho-capitalist vision in which like-minded people can “exit” and place themselves beyond the legal and economic reach of nation-states in parallel, networked special economic zones.

His ideas are often couched in vituperative attacks on his perceived enemies, including academics, government employees and the media.

As early as 2013, Srinavisan was advocating a “reverse diaspora” in which people enabled by technology could assemble in “cloud cities … outside the United States”. These “could be floating cities in international waters as put forth by Peter Thiel, or one of the more ambitious 80,000 person colonies on Mars desired by Elon Musk”.

Soon after, in response to reporting linking Silicon Valley figures to the anti-democratic neo-reactionary movement and its leading light, Curtis Yarvin, Srinavasan reportedly emailed Yarvin with the suggestion that “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out”.

He later cited Yarvin in The Network State, writing: “As Yarvin in particular has documented at length, the most important left-authoritarians are not formally part of the elected state at all. They are the professors, activists, bureaucrats, and journalists.”

He describes people in these fields as constituting “the control circuitry for the US government”.

Last September, he opened a residential network school for would-be builders of network nations, reportedly located in Malaysia’s Forest City, whose “requirements include an admiration of ‘western values’, seeing Bitcoin as the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and trusting AI over human courts and judges”.

Balaji Srinivasan in this 2022 picture. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The network state vision has already inspired an attempt to build a city, California Forever, in rural Solano county, with investors including Andreessen and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Network state advocates also reportedly want to construct a similar “charter city” in Greenland if it is annexed by the United States.

Donald Trump has floated the idea of creating 10 such “freedom cities” on federal land, including San Francisco’s Presidio.

The movement also overlaps with efforts to mount a rightwing takeover of city governments in San Francisco and Oakland, with the likes of the Y Combinator CEO, Garry Tan, backing both projects.

Srinivasan has offered lurid fantasies of what a tech-controlled San Francisco might look like. In an October 2023 podcast interview, he envisioned a city controlled by tech-aligned “grays” enjoying privileged access to large parts of the city, bribing a pliant police department, and with “blues” – San Francisco’s liberals – subject to exclusion and hostile propaganda.

Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Righs and a longtime observer of far-right organizing in the mountain west, told the Guardian in an interview that the Wagon Box was significant for being one of the first real-world attempts at constructing a “network state” hub beyond California.

“They’ve tipped their hand a bit with the constant references to [accelerationist theorist] Nick Land and Italian futurism. This is a different veneer of the apocalyptic, post-democratic world view that is also quite common with militia and prepper types.”

The Wagon Box reportedly attracted immediate scepticism from residents of tiny unincorporated Story in the months following its establishment.

Attenders at a 2023 public meeting reportedly expressed concerns both about the draft DAO document’s vision of “‘capital seed for a nascent network state’ and … a place for either gatherings or apocalyptic retreat”, and McNiel’s association with the notorious anti-government activist Ryan Payne.

In 2018, Payne was sentenced to federal prison on conspiracy charges after playing the role of, according to a federal judge, “an architect” of the 2016 Malheur national wildlife refuge occupation, in which he participated alongside the likes of the current fugitive Ammon Bundy.

‘A criminal regime’

Wagon Box has hosted a series of events since McNiel’s acquisition, many with guests and themes associated with the far right.

The 27 April event, Dawn in the West: A Futurist Serata (DitW) was subtitled “An UncleTed Talk”, a reference both to Ted talks and a nickname for the so-called Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.

Advertising materials highlighted themes including the work of Land, who, alongside Yarvin, is one of the progenitors of the neo-reactionary movement, whose anti-democratic ideas have been cited as an inspiration for the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal government.

Another advertised speaker at that event was Jonathan Keeperman. The Guardian identified Keeperman in 2024 as the man behind the L0m3z X account and rightwing publisher Passage Press.

Keeperman-founded Passage Press is also listed as a participant in Wagon Box’s 31 May roundtable Coalition for Cultural Renewal (CCR).

The schedule for a Wagon Box event last August promised a conversation between Keeperman and the journalist James Pogue on “the failure of liberalism and globalization”.

Pogue has written extensively about the new right for media outlets including the New York Times and Vanity Fair.

In a post at the Wagon Box’s Substack newsletter, Pogue and McNiel are pictured together in a photograph purportedly taken inside the Passage-Press-sponsored Coronation Ball in Washington this January, and described in a caption as “Wagon Box brothers”.

Keeperman is one of the overlaps between Wagon Box and a broader far-right milieu.

Keeperman, for example, spoke last month at a pro-natalist conference in Austin, Texas, whose speaker roster included self-described eugenicists and promoters of race science.

At the event, in response to a small protest on site, Keeperman took to X, posting: “NATALISM IS NAZISM Say it loud say it proud.”

Balaji Srinivasan spoke at the same conference in 2023.

The Natalism conference founder, Kevin Dolan, is listed in Texas company records as the principal of a natalism.org non-profit; a newly incorporated Eternal Capital Texas Inc; and Exit, a men-only organization which he characterized in a Substack newsletter as a rightwing business network which is “not just about making life in the regime more tolerable … setting ourselves up to succeed as it declines”.

He founded that organization following Guardian reporting in 2021 that identified him as the man behind an influential “DezNat” account, “@extradeadjcb”.

Exit is billed as a participant in Wagon Box’s CCR event, which will include other far-right publishers , along with Murphy’s Other Life and hard-right online magazine IM-1776.

The Guardian previously reported on IM-1776’s support of authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele; its enthusiasm for extremist political figures such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Kaczynski; and its close links with contemporary hard-right activists like the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, Erik Prince and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood.

IM-1776’s literary editor, Daniel Miller, is a speaker at DitW, and in YouTube videos posted to Wagon Box’s channel he is characterized as a writer-in-residence.

In a January article for IM-1776, Miller called for Donald Trump to overthrow the government of the UK led by Keir Starmer and “liberate” the country, saying it was run by “a criminal regime” dominated by “a mafia-like organization of pathological personalities”, a necessity “as clear as the imperative of the Vietnamese to invade Cambodia and remove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979”.

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

The Oakland connection

Events this spring also bill speakers associated with a tech-backed hard-right political movement in California’s Bay Area.

Scott – who has run both for city council and mayor in Oakland – is set to appear at the Doomer Optimism Campout in June.

Scott’s political activities in Oakland – including the candidacies and his advocacy for the recall of former mayor Sheng Thao last year – have been punctuated by scandals.

During his 2022 campaign media reports revealed a 2021 arrest on charges of brandishing a firearm, in an incident that took place not far from the community garden he founded in West Oakland. Those charges were later dismissed.

Last December, the city of Oakland applied for a restraining order against Scott over his alleged harassment of a city worker during the recall campaign. Among other things, Scott reportedly claimed that the employee was a pedophile on social media and posted their address publicly. In a February settlement, Scott agreed to stop posting personal information about the employee online.

Seneca Scott, left, at a rally in Oakland last year. Photograph: San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst/Getty Images

Scott has received backing from rightwing tech figures including Tan, who, like Scott, has agitated against progressive approaches to homelessness and law and order, and employed bareknuckle social-media posting to promote his views.

“If you want Oakland to be great then you will follow and support Seneca,” Tan wrote on X last year.

In Oakland, Scott has drawn scrutiny for anti-transgender commentary and attacks on progressive voices in politics and media.

Scott appeared at another Wagon Box event in summer 2024 in conversation about “Cities: urban agriculture, crime, and criminal justice reform”.

Pogue also appeared alongside Scott at his community garden in a 2023 event hosted by a Scott-run non-profit, Neighbors Together Oakland, that was last year shuttered by California’s attorney general last year for conducting fundraising without a non-profit license.

In an interview with Free Press in 2023, Scott had said he planned to use that non-profit as a platform to support “100 nontraditional candidates” for city councils, school boards, and potentially higher offices across the US.

Another Doomer Optimism Campout speaker is Andrew Hock, a Tennessee political consultant who was reportedly involved with an alleged attempt to facilitate anonymous donations in support of the recall of Mayor Thao.

Questions about Foundational Oakland Unite’s fundraising came amid a flood of campaign money into pro-recall groups, much of it from big-money donors. As previously reported in the Guardian, deep-pocketed tech figures have been involved in attempts to drag politics to the right in Oakland and San Francisco.

In April, 2024 the Thao recall campaign sent an email to prospective donors offering “options for donors to remain private if you prefer”. Oakland city law forbids anonymous donations to political candidates. The message included an email address for Andrew Hock at Foundational Oakland Unites, a political action committee founded by Scott, as the main point of contact for donations.

According to 2024 reporting by the Oaklandside, Scott previously employed Hock as a paid campaign consultant during his 2022 mayoral campaign.

Scott claims to be a part-owner of Hock’s campaign consultant group, Laschian Consulting. In an April 17 post to X, Scott claimed that Laschian Consulting “has planted its flag and is already in talks to help other major US cities fight back against the soggies and their anti-human agenda”, using a self-coined derogatory term to refer to social democrats.

“If your city is spiraling due to failed progressive policies and a coordinated NGO + public sector union takeover, give us a call. Maybe we can help you save your city too.”

In January, Thao, the recalled mayor, was herself federally indicted over allegations including that she solicited political donations in violation of campaign finance laws.

The alleged straw donor campaign for Thao was uncovered by Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission in an investigation that began half a decade ago. Though the PEC did not make a criminal referral, FBI white-collar crime investigators in Oakland picked up the thread and built their own criminal case independently.

The PEC’s budget was slashed earlier this year amid a citywide fiscal crisis, severely impacting its ability to complete ongoing investigations.

Hock did not respond to requests for comment.